You will find them, however, on specialized tech websites and forums. These websites are your best bet for finding and hiring top tech candidates, especially passive ones.

Top 7 sources of tech candidates

1. GitHub

GitHub is the world’s largest software development platform. It is a place where developers can host and review their code, manage projects, and build software alongside 31 million developers. Basically, it is a site where developers store their code and share it with others

for collaboration, further development or simply usage.

2. Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow is the largest most trusted online community for developers to learn and share their knowledge. It has more than 50 million unique visitors come to Stack Overflow every month. Basically, Stack Overflow is a Q&A site. It is a place where developers post their programming-related questions and coding problems hoping that other developers will be able to help them. It has a very popular job board.

3. Dice

Dice is a well-known job board and candidate sourcing site. Dice’s database includes over 11 million unique and actionable tech profiles – including 2.2 million complete with résumés.

4. Toptal

Toptal is an exclusive network of the top freelance software developers, designers, finance experts, product managers, and project managers in the world. All candidates on Toptal have a proven track record and elite industry experience in design, business, or technology.

5. Upwork

Upwork is the largest global freelancing website. With millions of jobs posted on Upwork annually, freelancers are earning money by providing companies with over 5,000 skills across more than 70 categories of work.

6. We work remotely

We Work Remotely is a niche job board for remote jobseekers. It’s the largest, most experienced and dedicated remote only job board in the world with over 1.5 million individuals visiting the site annually. It is primarily comprised of developer jobs.

7. Gun.io

Gun.io is a platform which helps employers hire elite freelance software developers. All the developers on Gun.io are already tested and vetted. Gun.io has the most comprehensive vetting process in the entire freelance industry. While other sites just do automated code testing, Gun.io freelancers through four separate assessments. They test each freelancer’s technical acumen through an automated coding exam, a live coding exercise, and a technical interview with a member of our engineering team.